How we hacked our way to better Travel Discounts online!

It's been a while folks. I've been meaning to write this for a while as we saved a huge amount of money whilst travelling by a few simple ‘travel hacks' on the likes of booking sites / airlines.

I refer to this as Geo-locational travel hacking. Something you may not have heard before?

Basically it works like this.. Some travel companies (hotels / holiday operators / airlines) use data about your location (geo location based on IP) to tailor pricing and offers to your specific market. The fact is, many large companies like laterooms.com, agoda.com or booking.com are global booking agents and they deal with many different markets from a single domain. What you see on that website is determined by your geo location.

This infographic explains more on the geo based pricing for travel, hotels and air tickets.

You can test all of this yourself by downloading a VPN and switching your location around and searching for the same thing over and over again from different countries. Here's how to test it out.

Download a VPN, you can get free ones but generally speaking the free ones are slow and don't work. We always used (and still do) VyprVPN because its cheap and works everywhere (even in China!). You might as well sign up for that free trial as it's 3 days worth of premium VPN access and you can cancel risk free.

If you have Chrome, download the extension ‘Cache Killer' and ‘EditthisCookie' – you need these to perform a valid test..

One installed, open up the VyprVPN application.

Visit http://www.kayak.com/ (good test for geo pricing variations) and enter a search query and bring up the results. Make sure they are converted into your own currency.

OK now keep that tab open, open a new tab and open Kayak again, just keep the homepage open

With ‘EditthisCookie' delete the cookie information for Kayak (its a one-click process)

With ‘Cache Killer', clear the cache.

These 2 steps are very important as you want to clear any trace of you visiting the site beforehand.

Now connect to a random country on VyprVPN. Go back to Kayak and refresh the page (the new tabbed one).

It will clearly show you that it thinks you are in that specific country.

Do the same search as the other tab you have open already. Then change the currency into your own.

See any difference? Crazy right!

Put VyprVPN to the test and you will see prices changed by more than:

$2000 on flights using kayak.com

$400 on car rentals using rentalcars.com

How much is your location costing you?

We connected to VyprVPN server locations in different countries and the difference is sometimes crazy! Now you know how to save money on flights, car rentals and other travel purchases by simply using a VPN!

Darryl left the shorelines of England in 2013 to study and travel in China and South East Asia for a year. Darryl is a co-founder of escapingthedesk.com, a travel blog with the aim of sharing travel tips, country & city guides for other backpackers. Visit my Google+ page.